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London Nuke Plant Loses 30 Kilos of Plutonium
solafide writes "The Globe and Mail reports 'A British nuclear-reprocessing plant [at Sellafield] cannot account for nearly 30 kilograms of plutonium, but authorities believe it is an accounting issue rather than a loss of potential bomb-making material, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority said.' Although it says later plutonium is only 1% of what they deal with there. The Times Online has more details."
I don't say that Boston is the same as New York. Please don't do this to my country.
To pre-empt the tin-foil hatters: it is not possible to construct a nuclear weapon from power-grade plutonium, and terrorists do not have the technology to refine it into weapons-grade plutonium. However, it would make a nasty dirty bomb.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
A nuclear weapon only uses about a grapefruit sized piece of fissionable material.
And only about 8 grams of matter were actually converted to enegery by the original nukes used against Japan.
30 kg missing seems like a big deal to me. I'd like to know for sure whether its an accounting issue or someone else has it.
Sellafield is right up in the north west of england. London is in the south east. The people who decided where to put Sellafield(then Windscale) are, however, based in London. Strangely they decided the best place for it was as far away as possible.
you had me at #!
If you reprocess tons of spent fuel then those little fraction-of-a-percent measurement errors add up. Also, in a big plant you could have an ounce of plutonium stuck in a filter one place, another ounce elsewhere, and add up to tens of kilos.
What's scary is that the margins of error are big enough to include several bombs worth of material.
The BBC has had this story since yesterday!
From what I read on http://news.bbc.co.uk, the "missing" plutonium was a result of the way in which material was accounted for, not an actual loss.
-- The problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.
That's not exactly true. Several governments have investigated the possiblity of making bombs from mixed-isotope Pu. It is possible. However even the best designs have a chance of a fizzle due to premature fission when the critical mass is being compressed. Making a bomb from power grade Pu is definitely quite a bit harder than making one out of pure Pu-239, which is harder than making one out of Uranium.
Power grade plutonium doesn't have that problem to the same extent, because the reaction doesn't have to happen at a precisely controlled moment.
Separating out Pu-239 from Pu-240 is a similar problem to separating U-235 from U-238: slow, tedious, and lots of centrifuges and similar. Because the relative weights are so close together, it's a significantly harder problem. This is why the production of weapons grade plutonium requires very regular reprocessing of fuel from the reactor core; otherwise, you'll get too much Pu-240, and it becomes too hard.
While the radiation is a problem - the chemical issues with Pu are almost worse. The stuff is more poisonous than Arsenic
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Depleted uranium doesn't have much of a 'dirty bomb' problem... Just a general chemical problem -- not that much different from what you'd get from burning lead, nickel, or cobolt. Plutonium is more like arsnic with heavy cancer causing problems added in.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Sellafield is nowhere near London. It's about a 300 mile drive away according to Multimap. It's at the complete opposite side of the country.
You're right, I'd like to point out also that the same atom can have different toxicity depending on its oxidation state. If you have seen Erin Brockovich, where the whole case was Cr(VII) being measured with the emission limit of Cr(III), causing poisoning among the population, well that's the same thing.
U and Pu are actinides, and that means they can have many different oxidation states, each with its own chemistry.
This is also why lead in gasoline and paint is carcinogen, while veterans have lived with lead bullets in their body for decades.
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It's not any particular lump(s) of Pu that are missing. I think they took in some used fuel rods and estimated somehow how much Pu was in it. Then, when they reprocessed them they found they had slightly less Pu than they expected.
Depleted uranium has the problem of "Journalist Blame" attached to it. It was heavily used in Gulf War 1 and the Serbian Bombings and the areas where it was used are suffering cancer rates between 10 and 50 times above the world average. This was erroneously blamed on it.
The reaility is that the cancer rates around Basra, parts of ex-Ugo, Western Bulgaria, Western Romania and so on are caused by the choice of targets for "shock and awe" campaigns.
The shock and awe campaigns blanket bombed into oblivion the industrial potential of the target countries - Iraq and Serbia. This industrial potential was mostly built in the late sixties and early seventies using enormous quantities of Asbestous and plastics that emit carcinogenous chemicals when burning. All this got released when they were bombed back into the stone age.
Which in turn resulted in tens of thousands of people to die, dieing or who shall die of cancer in the targeted areas and the areas downwind from it (Bulgaria and Romania on the Balkans and Iran in the Gulf).
This has been blamed by various shallow journalistic research on depleted uranium. It may have a role, but it is minor. The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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